Last week, Iran's president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, abruptly fired his foreign minister, Manouchehr Mottaki. Even by his low standards of etiquette, the event was unprecedented, leaving aghast even traditional supporters of the president.

Mottaki was visiting Senegal to mend relations in West Africa after Iranian weapons shipments had been seized in Gambia. The shipments were understood to have been the works of Iran's Revolutionary Guards (IRGC).

Venezuela views its Jewish community as "foreign" rather than Venezuelan and wants to replicate Iran’s treatment of Jews, according to notes in a cable sent from the US embassy in Caracas and released by WikiLeaks.

The correspondence, sent following a meeting with members of the Confederation of Israelite Associations of Venezuela (CAIV), reveals that the community believes "the horizon is dark" for Jews in Venezuela and that antisemitism is "government-sponsored”.

There was a farcical ending to Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's visit last week to Lebanon.

Hours before his departure on Thursday, he had one last meeting, at the Iranian embassy in Beirut. His local ally, Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah, emerged from his hideout bringing him, as a tribute, a rifle supposedly taken from an Israeli soldier during the Second Lebanon War. But it was a sham. The rifle was an AK-47 Kalashnikov - not a weapon used by Israeli forces.

According to the Arab press, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is planning to end his tour of Lebanon by symbolically lobbing a rock at Israel over the border fence.

The thinking, presumably, is that this would be a great PR coup - that the image would cement Mr Ahmadinejad's reputation as the Islamic world's foremost opponent of the Jewish state. But would it really?

The Israeli government is worried that Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's visit to Lebanon next week could signal the start of an escalation on its northern border.

Mr Ahmadinejad is scheduled to arrive on October 13 for a two-day visit. His itinerary includes a tour of towns and villages in the south of Lebanon where heavy fighting took place between the IDF and Hizbollah during the Second Lebanon War in 2006. According to some reports, the Iranian president may even take part in symbolic stone-throwing towards Israeli soldiers on the border.